I wrote on Tuesday that a big fight was coming in the Senate over SAFRA, the Obama administration’s attempt to reform the student loan system, making billions of dollars of new money available to educational institutions and student financial aid.

Well, the fight is here, and punches are being thrown.

The Washington post reported last night that six Democratic senators have signed a letter objecting to passage of SAFRA as it now stands, and that White House officials have been meeting with congressional leaders to try to find a way forward.

The crucial question right now is whether SAFRA will be included in the upcoming reconciliation vote in the Senate, under which issues can be considered on a straight up-or-down vote, avoiding the filibusters that so often snarl Senate legislation these days. The primary purpose of the reconciliation bill is the passage of the federal budget, but it has emerged as the best chance for the passage of health care reform and student loan reform in the immediate future.

The current system, which the New York Times described yesterday as one in which “the government pays private, for-profit student lending companies to make risk-free loans using taxpayer money,” is a cash cow for banks, which have lobbied aggressively to kill reform.

See my Tuesday post for more info on SAFRA and the current legislative battle.

The growth of the student protest movement has sparked a series of debates about strategy and tactics, and those debates have gotten more intense in the wake of the March 4 Day of Action. Activists and their critics have legitimate disagreements about methods and goals, and those disagreements are now being aired in public with growing frequency.

I’m going to be talking a bit about those disagreements soon, but first I want to clear away some of the strawmen that have popped up recently. If there’s going to be a debate, and there should be, let it be in good faith.

I read an essay this morning that suffers from all of the weaknesses that I’ve got in mind. In an opinion piece in the online journal Politics Daily, Muskingum College senior Joshua Chaney argues that March 4 represented a missed opportunity because “participants’ messages were mixed, their disruptions turned away other students and members of the public, and their voices often fell on the wrong ears.” That’s a legitimate argument, but unfortunately Chaney gets the specifics of it completely wrong.

Here are four things to bear in mind when writing, talking, or thinking about contemporary student protest:

1. Mixed messages come with the territory.

Chaney complains of the March 4 protesters’ “lack of a common voice and purpose,” calling for “clearer messaging.” That’s all fine nad dandy, but it avoids the central question: clearer messaging from whom?

The contemporary American student movement isn’t an organization or a political party. Nobody was screening March 4 actions and giving out credentials. There was no seal of approval. This was a grassroots event. Nobody had the power to impose a common agenda on the events, because the events weren’t coordinated or conceived by a central body. Anybody could mount an action on March 4, and just about everybody did. That’s how social movements roll.

“Student activists are now taking divergent paths in determining what steps are next,” Chaney says. Well, of course they are. They weren’t all on one path to begin with. That diversity is a reflection of the vigor and vitality of the movement.

2. A rally and a lobby day are two different things.

Chaney quotes a Berkeley first-year as saying that students should be talking to legislators in Sacramento rather than “waving [their] hands” at a campus protest. I’m a big fan of lobbying. Huge fan. But I also recognize that state legislators read the papers and watch television, and I’m having a hard time remembering the last time that a sit-down with an assemblymember’s staff made the evening news or attracted the attention of a student on her way to class.

Mass action gets noticed, and getting noticed is part of getting results.

It’s also important to note that many protesters last Thursday weren’t particularly interested in swaying legislators. Some were working to reform campus-specific policies. Some were looking to build student power in their institutions. Some, for that matter, were trying to bring on the revolution and overthrow capitalism entirely.

Before you tell people that protesting won’t get them what they want, make sure you know what they want.

3. The disruptions of March 4 were actually really mild.

Chaney opens with a vivid account of the campus climate of the late 1960s. Eight bombings in a year at Berkeley. A riot that sent nearly fifty cops to the hospital. Hundreds of weapons confiscated from student protesters.

This “style of protest,” he says, “was alive in various forms” on March 4.

Really? Come on.

There were more than a hundred actions on March 4, and Chaney finds evidence of disruptive activity at just four of them. At Davis and in the Bay area, students blocked traffic, or tried to. At Santa Cruz, students barred cars from campus. And at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, fifteen activists were arrested “for obstructing justice and disorderly conduct.” That’s it. That’s all he’s got.

In colonial days, armed students regularly burned buildings and terrorized professors. In the early years of the American republic universities often had to be shut down because student unrest threatened life and property. Campus riots hospitalized untold numbers of activists, police, and bystanders in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Student violence didn’t begin with the sixties — it’s been a recurring theme of campus life for hundreds of years.

But there was virtually no student violence last Thursday. Throughout the country, even on campuses where activists had clashed with police in the recent past, activists conducted themselves with care and restraint. I am aware of only two serious injuries on the day — a student who was hit by a car that was running the blockade at UC Santa Cruz, and a high schooler who fell off the highway overpass in Oakland. That’s all.

If you’re going to criticize the student activists of March 4 as being out of control, then no grassroots movement will ever meet your standards for restraint and decorum.

4. Mass action works.

The student protests of the 1960s that Chaney decries provided the impetus for profound changes in the American university, and in society more broadly. In the late sixties and early seventies students across the country achieved huge victories in their efforts to secure a real role in campus governance. They forced the creation of ethnic and gender studies departments on hundreds of campuses. They ended the draft. With the adoption of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1971, they even gained the right to vote. They didn’t win everything they were fighting for, but they won a hell of a lot.

Was it rioting and bombing that won those victories? Mostly it wasn’t. The vast majority of student agitation then, as now, was peaceful and disciplined. But that movement, far messier and far rowdier than today’s, transformed the country.

A big fight is looming in the Senate over SAFRA, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act.

SAFRA is the most ambitious attempt to reform higher education lending in ages. The bill would put the federal government in charge of providing federal student loans — students would borrow money under the same terms as before, but the money that used to go to banking institutions’ overhead and profit would go to education instead.

The passage of SAFRA would provide billions of dollars in new funding to education programs: $4.7 billion this year alone. Starting next year, it would provide a big boost of cash to Pell Grants, reducing the cost of higher education for needy students. And it would simplify the student loan application process too.

SAFRA passed the House of Representatives last September, but it was put on hold in the Senate because of fears of a Republican filibuster. Here’s where things stand now:

Ordinarily, Senate minorities have the power to keep legislation from coming to a vote by filibustering — extending debate indefinitely. It takes 60 votes to end a filibuster. But an exception to the filibuster rule allows the Senate to pass a budget bill every year through a process called “reconciliation,” and that bill only requires a 50-vote majority.

Bills that have a budgetary impact can be added to the budget bill for passage via reconciliation, ao Senate Democrats are now looking to pass SAFRA that way.

But only one reconciliation vote happens each year.

And they’re also looking to pass health care reform through the same process.

It’s likely to get messy.

So that’s the situation. SAFRA is a popular bill, in the Senate and in the country at large, but its future is far from certain. What happens depends on a lot of complicated maneuvering in Congress, and that maneuvering is already well underway. I’ll be following this story as it develops, but for now here are some resources you can use to get more info and find out how to take action:

• The United States Student Association has a SAFRA fact sheet, organizing toolkit (PDF), and other materials.

• The news site Inside Higher Ed published a big, thorough SAFRA story yesterday, with a clear explanation of the bill’s prospects and a bunch of links to more information.

• The House Education and Labor Committee has a SAFRA page here.

On Wednesday night the University of Maryland men’s basketball team beat longtime rivals Duke University, and fans took to the streets. Campus radical Malcolm Harris was with them, and he’s written about what he saw in his column in the campus paper.

“I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots,” Harris begins, but after what he saw on Wednesday night, he just can’t bring himself to. Students came together in “celebration and joy” that night, and “for a few hours, a student community existed apart from university structures.” When they chanted MARYLAND they didn’t mean “the buildings or the endowment or the logo”

“We meant one another.”

The night of revelry has been called a riot, and there was some property damage done. (Just how much is in dispute.) But the only real violence, Harris says, was perpetrated by the police who arrested twenty-three students “and beat and pepper-sprayed many more.”

Meanwhile, he says, students came together. White guys in backwards baseball caps yelled at the cops for singling out black students for arrest. When the police started banging their batons on their riot shields, the students yelled “de-FENSE!” in time with the rhythm. They made up chants and heard them spread through the crowd. They picked each other up when they fell. They connected. “Students of all stripes, shoulder to shoulder.”

Student activism has always straddled the line between politics and play, between organizing for social change and acting up for the hell of it. Either impulse can be creative or destructive, either can be deployed for positive or negative ends, but both impulses are, as Harris suggests, inherent to student agitation.

The students who swarmed onto Route 1 were, he says, remembering who they were.

“We are the students, we are not the police. This is our university, not theirs. This feeling has been in short supply … but Wednesday night the air was thick with it.”